Tales from the Office on Employee Recognition, Employee Rewards, Life Hacks, Gamification, and Human Resources.

Monthly Archives: June 2014

Only 13% of the world’s workforce is engaged (1), leading to billions of dollars lost in potential productivity. To fix this, Dan Pink identified purpose as one of the three most important drivers towards engagement (2). Recognize has an innovative strategy to help staff feel they have purpose in the organization. We call this strategy Collective Gamification.

Increase levels together through Collective Gamification

Workers don’t realize their influence in companies, because they lack tools to visualize the difference they make. To provide insight, Recognize is building strategy to show workers their influence in the organization. Imagine a gauge that represents a company’s Recognition Engagement Score (RES), or how much recognition is engaging staff in an organization. When a worker sends a recognition, this gauge’s needle moves to the right- providing instant feedback to the user they are influencing the greater good. Another use of Collective Gamification is collective levels. When a user sends a recognition they influence the leveling-up of their team, department, or company. Staff work together to increase their team’s level. The result is more togetherness and teamwork.

It isn’t about me anymore, it is about us

Employee recognition must go both ways to truly work in an organization. A worker receives recognition, giving them a sense of connectedness with the company (3). A worker sends a recognition, and sees immediate collective benefit. If staff realize this potential through collective gamification, only good will follow for the organization.

Employee recognition is a means to show staff their time is valued, they have purpose, and ability to grow in an organization. At Recognize, we now help companies maximize their staff’s potential through personalized recognition campaigns, or levels of achievement.

The employee recognition campaign strategy

Discover the values or the behaviors the company wants to promote. In Recognize, those values are presented as graphical badges.

Determine the principles that guide those values or behaviors. Managers and company leaders are educated on the principles and asked to look for peers exhibiting those principles. As result, the staff has a top-of-mind mentality towards promoting the company’s goals.

Each badge has levels of achievement. The levels are marked by number of recognitions for a specific badge. At each level we recommend employees are given status, access, and power in the organization.

The employee can print out a recognition certificate to show their accomplishments.

The Recognize Team sends leaders weekly reports of who is excelling based on recognition data.

The employee feels intrinsically motivated when they have purpose and mastery in the organization. Status, access, and power help create that motivation.

Recognition levels

Status is when an employee can move up in each of the recognition badges. For instance, if “Social Media” is an initiative, the manager can create a Social Media badge. When an employee reaches new levels of Social Media, they are rewarded with an additional title of Social Media Expert or Social Media Strategist. The employee now knows they are noticed for their abilities.

Access is opening new doors to employees through a variety of methods. At lower levels, an employee may have access to a special parking spot for a period of time. At higher levels an employee has access to a conference. The increase of rewards motivates staff to excel in values or behaviors the company looks to promote.

As they say, power is addicting. Increasing an employee’s power in the organization drives the feeling of mastery. We recommend giving staff various levels of decision-making power via the recognition program. A junior marketer may actually be an expert in email marketing, and through employee recognition this can be discovered and validated. If this employee levels-up in a recognition email marketing campaign, they can be rewarded with power to make specific email marketing decisions. The junior marketer may still be a junior marketer, but has a new sense of purpose and mastery.

The Recognize campaigns emphasizes intrinsic motivation in the workplace. Through a well-planned campaign a company can promote any behavior. To learn more about recognition campaigns, please contact us.